What's a little dissection between friends?
It hadn't been easy for Simon to decide what to do with the dead vampire. Or the dead person. Simon still wasn't entirely convinced. Still, he had eventually decided that despite his own extensive knowledge of all things in the universe, this... really wasn't his area of expertise. So then it became an issue of finding someone for whom this was the area of expertise, and he had to get to that phantom person before his dead body began to rot.
So it was that Simon ended up ransacking just about every Fortean, Occult, and Scientific journal he had for someone who might know about vampires while at the same time... not being a complete imbecile. It was only after two hours of painstakingly going through his personal scholarly archive that Simon distantly reading some seemingly academic articles by a London zoologist on some of the more unconventional fauna of the city. That, was clearly the man to see about such things. It took him a few more hours of that night, and a few hours of the next morning to track down the man's name and current lodgings. By the next afternoon Simon was walking confidently towards the doorway of the house of Sciurus Thatch with a spring in his step, and a disembodied head in his bag. He reached up, and rapped smartly on the door of the other man's house, and waited.
Because who didn't want to look at the body parts presented to them by complete strangers?
Sciurus, for his part, had spent the last several days at the London Zoo, assisting the veterinary surgeon with a particularly troublesome birth of a giraffe calf. It was... messy, but although the calf had a rocky start at life, things seemed to have stabilised for now. And so, now set for a while, he decided it was time to relax and spoil Julia Drusilla a bit (in between forcing books and lessons upon her), as well as take a brief break from his obsessive pursuits into the land of the undead. Besides, it wasn't as though he could mess around with said pursuits while Julia was awake. She was getting to an age now where the noises coming from the cellar could not be so easily waved away. This, of course, left him with very little to do during the day, if he wasn't working.
...Sciurus really needed a daytime hobby.
At the sound of a knock, Sciurus looked up from the game of cards he and Julia had been playing, then set his hand down onto the table, and patted his daughter on the head as he passed. "No peeking," he said, a bit distracted, as he headed out of the parlour and towards the entrance. He opened the door a crack, peeking out at the stranger, then pulled it open fully and offered him a wide smile. He had absolutely no idea who this gentleman was, but... well, couldn't hurt to put on a friendly face.
"Good afternoon!" he chirped, offering his hand to shake, although a part of him hoped that the man would decline. He wasn't wearing any gloves, after all, and it was the middle of a summer day. He was certain the fellow's hands would be sweaty. "Sciurus, Sciurus Thatch." He said his name quickly and with great exuberance, in hopes that this man wouldn't know enough Latin to catch its meaning-- and if he did, well... that he hadn't heard it quickly enough to catch it. "Here with a delivery, are you?" He asked, pointing at the bag, then cocked his head and glanced at the stranger's face. "Only, I haven't a clue what you would be delivering... You..." He looked at the bag again, this time with a bit more leeriness, as though he'd just remembered something awful. "You haven't come from Bedlam, have you? I don't know how she continues to find the means to--"
Oh, but he was saying too much. Sciurus shook his head and, unnervingly pleasant grin returning, looked the other man in the eyes. "Perhaps I should let you get a word in. My apologies. What can I do for you?"
Simon's first response to the surprisingly buoyant creature, greeting him from the doorway of the house of Thatch, was to automatically assume that this man was some manner of servant. In fact when the man stuck out his hand instead of politely asking Simon what he could do to help, the look he received for his troubles was one of deep incredulity. Really? The ears? And the nose? And the big, weird grin? This was Sciurus Thatch?
Suddenly all those papers about mermaids and unicorns were starting to make sense.
Looking slightly morose all of a sudden, Simon reached out to shake the other man's hand obligingly, "Simon Alexander." He introduced himself, before raising his eyebrows as Sciurus began to chatter away about what he naturally assumed the nature of Simon's visit would be. It was curious at first, before swiftly entering the territory of the irritating. Simon was clearly not a delivery man! What kind of delivery man carried a head around with him? Obviously Sciurus was just a mad infant of a man! No sane and educated fellow would ever mistake Simon for anything less than he was! A noble, intelligent, scholar, first in courage, last in sloth! Simon caught himself smiling ever so slightly as he mentally preened himself, tuning back in to Sciurus's words when the man unexpectedly mentioned Bedlam. Simon perked up visibly at this mention, he'd never known anyone in contact with Bedlam! He'd heard of people, certainly, but no one who received strange and unwanted packages from the place, as Mr. Thatch appeared to.
"Mmhmm. Yes. Well, look, I read some of your articles and I need you to take a look at a severed head for me."
Simon said calmly. Then he paused, and lifted his bag up a little, adding helpfully,
"It's in my bag."
Sciurus's expression shifted as soon as the head was mentioned-- it was as though the childish demeanour had been peeled away for the briefest of moments, uncovering something darker, more serious-- but he quickly arched his brows and quirked his lips in a nervous frown.
"A... head." He chewed on his lower lip for a moment. "In your bag? Is it human?" His eyes shot down at the bag again, keenly interested, until he realised that in conventional society, this was an inappropriate reaction to such announcements. He pulled back, away from Simon, clutching at the door protectively. "I believe what you're looking for is a coroner-- barring that, a physician. My speciality isn't--" Wait. Still not normal. "How on Earth did you come by that, anyway?! Carrying a head around-- you must be mad! Or a murderer. If you're feeling particularly adventurous, I suppose you could be both!"
Simon totally had an awesome lie all lined up for this moment. He frowned at Sciurus, like the implication of him being in any way connected to this man's death was a thought which appalled him! "I'll have you know I am neither!" He declared, in a voice which carried with an impressive imitation of a man offended and outraged at such a suggestion, "I'll have you know I've already spoken to a coroner! In fact, it was the coroner who sold me the thing! No good for his students, he said, for he wouldn't know what to tell them about it! He didn't know any more than I whether it was human or not! So I thought to myself, it must be either human? Or something else, and what do I know of something elses? Why, nothing at all! Nothing in the slightest, but you know who does know of such things? Why! The man who wrote those fine articles on my shelf! Mr. Sciurus Thatch!" Okay, that got his excuse for carrying a severed head around with him out of the way, and he'd crowbarred in some insincere flattery at the same time. So pretty much the moment he'd finished with that, the fake look of distress and sincerity dropped, and Simon was back to looking distantly self satisfied.
Reaching down for his bag, he pulled back the cover slightly, and scrambled past the first of the hair, aiming for the lips of the man, "Look, the strange part of it is in the canine teeth. There might be something in the eyes or the bone structure as well, but I didn't want to take it apart by myself, since I'm not absolutely certain what I'd be looking for, or how to identify anything I found-- Mm. Look, are you going to let me in, or must I pull it out in the middle of the street?" Simon stilled his hands, keeping them deep in the bag, but resisting the temptation to pull out the head in public. He looked at Sciurus expectantly.
Sciurus wasn't entirely sold on the story. In fact, a (very paranoid) part of him believed that this was all an elaborate scheme of one of his family members, although to what end, he had no idea. But then, it was difficult to predict the motivations of the other Thatches. He was the only rational one. Still, it was enough to at least coax him away from the door he was using as a protective shield. When the bag opened, Sciurus leaned forward and peered down, trying to get a good look at the thing. What Simon offered was a great temptation to him, both as a researcher and as a... well, Thatch. But, there was a problem. He glanced over his shoulder, into the house, then looked at Simon again. "Ah, slight... complication. My daughter..."
But... but he really wanted to take a look at that head. Still, he couldn't run the risk of letting some potential madman in to harm his little Julia. Hm... He held up a finger. "One moment."
With that, Sciurus closed the door and locked it, then walked back to the parlour. After sending Julia to her room with a book, he told her that she was not allowed to leave or open the door until he told her to, then rushed down to the cellar to grab some of his tools. When he returned to the door, he had his own bag in hand. "Alright then, let's take a look at it, shall we?" He moved aside to let Simon in.
Simon's eyes widened in sheer disbelief as Sciurus claimed to have a daughter. Someone actually mated with this creature? No, that was unkind, he shouldn't think like that about someone who was technically helping him. Besides, it was probably a lie and Sciurus was just buying time while he hid something incriminating which had been left in public view in his house. Idly, Simon began to wonder what it was that Sciurus was hiding. Maybe he had a dead body of his own in there, he hadn't seemed particularly upset about being brought a head in a bag, but obviously a less trusting man than Simon wouldn't be so quick to volunteer a part of their corpse to a nigh total stranger, in fact, was this that wise a decision on his part? Maybe he should make a break for it before Sciurus came back...
Simon was just seriously beginning to consider bolting, when the door opened up again. Well, there went that plan. Simon cleared his throat, "Indeed!"
This said, he entered the house, slipping past Sciurus before straightening up to take his bearings, "Is there a specific room you'd prefer to do this in?" He asked.
Sciurus, meanwhile, was blissfully unaware of any contempt the other man may have held for him, and thus, grinned brightly at the 'Indeed!' He closed the door, locked it (in case somebody should barge in while they were examining a severed head), and ushered Simon into the kitchen. His excitement mounting (as he was anticipating a very special head indeed), he began to dig through his bag... then dug some more... and some more, which was impressive, considering it wasn't a large bag at all. Then, he let out a muttered curse. He'd left the medium dissection tray down in the cellar! Actually, he'd left all of them down in the cellar, but the medium one was most important, as he felt it was appropriately head-sized. Unfortunately, he was quite certain that there was something strapped to it already, and he really didn't fancy the idea of leaving his guest unattended to while he returned to the cellar and cleaned it off.
He glanced around the kitchen, looking for an appropriate substitute, and then his eyes lit up with glee as he caught sight of the cutting board. Quickly, he bounded over to it, then set it down on the kitchen table.
Hm.
He was going to be placing a strange head on it. Perhaps it wouldn't do to place it on the same side the food went on. Yes, that would be most unhygienic.
And so, Sciurus flipped the cutting board over, then began to remove his dissection tools-- scalpels, tongs, scissors, and so forth-- looking at Simon expectedly. "Well?" He motioned towards the cutting board. He wanted that head there and now! "Don't worry; it's clean."
Sciurus was nothing if not helpful.
Simon knitted his eyebrows slightly, looking down at the cutting board. There was a hypercritical part of him that wanted to question the decision to use a cutting board for this particular task, but he thought better of it. After all, it wasn't as though there was an operating table to hand. So he obligingly reached into his bag and pulled out the severed head, before leaning across to dump it gently onto the chopping board.
The head itself, was somewhat unremarkable in and of itself. The hair was a dusty brown colour, the neck wound a ragged line where the boy had hacked through it with the boning knife. Dead eyes hung open, staring out at the pair of degenerates with an expression of what might have been disapproval if the one giving it hadn't been dead. Simon reached forward, pulling back the creature's lips to display the same, extended fangs that Israel had shown him. "This was the main thing that was noticed as decidedly anomalous. The structure of the teeth, they appear to be retractable, by whatever this thing is, and I thought it best to consult an expert before I went looking for any further dissimilarities."
He glanced across at Sciurus, waiting for the man's response on this matter. The truth was he wasn't sure what he expected Sciurus to say, "Yes of course a vampire! I've seen many of them!" was... he had to admit, probably wishful thinking. What did he say if this turned out to be a completely natural bone condition? Should he turn on the boy? Or simply hide the evidence and be done with it?
Sciurus flinched slightly as the head was dropped onto the cutting board with a dull thud, more from the noise than the actual sight of it. Well, this was curious. The eyes had an eerie quality to them, like all eyes of the freshly deceased. To Sciurus, a corpse's eyes were almost paradoxical, seeming both alive and dead at once-- that is, until they dried out completely. Making a soft "hm"ing noise in his throat, he leaned close to the head, nose practically touching it, and pulled the upper lip up to get a better look at the canines. Could have been a birth defect, or a madman who enjoyed filing his teeth... Those were his first thoughts, at least, until he pushed the head back with his other hand to get a clearer look at the inside of the mouth. One finger touched a 'fang' gingerly, feeling for looseness. Upon closer inspection, it resembled an animal's tooth more than a human's-- that, at least, was something he was quite familiar with, having had an abundance of animals to examine in his time.
"And when did the subject... pass?" he asked, all too casually for a fellow with his hand in a dead man's mouth. As he spoke, he experimented with nudging the tooth this way and that, then pushed upwards, into the gums. To his surprise, the tooth yielded, just a touch. "Incidentally," he added, pushing again, this time more firmly, "what was the cause of death? The decapitation or--" He looked at Simon intently. "--'something else.'" As if on cue, the fang he'd been pressing retracted until it resembled a normal human canine-- perhaps slightly more sharp, but any differences were easy to ignore upon quick glance. He pulled at the tooth, coaxing it back down to its former length, then stared at it with rapt fascination. He had made a career out of studying the exotic, and never before had he seen anything quite like this. There wasn't a single living creature that he had encountered that had the capacity to retract and lengthen its teeth. He tugged at a few other teeth-- molars, incisors-- but it was only the canines that could shift like that.
Sciurus reached for his tools, fingers grasping at a scalpel, then his eyes drifted towards his hand and he seemed to remember something quite suddenly. "Oh." Grinning at Simon most jovially, he began to roll up his sleeves. "Wouldn't want to ruin this shirt!" he declared, then set the head upright and began the messy task of cutting through skin to get to the skull. Once finished with the incisions, he peeled back the skin and retrieved his bone saw. This next part, unfortunately, would take ages.
"Lovely day, wouldn't you agree?" Sciurus let out a happy sigh, working the saw even as his arm began to feel a bit stiff. "With the sun like it is, not a cloud out there, it brings such a sense of... vitality to the city! It's really quite infectious. Well--" He paused on his task to knock on the skull. "--not entirely infectious. Poor bastard." Then, humming, he continued his work.
Simon leaned in, watching as Sciurus gingerly investigated the creatures teeth, wincing slightly as he watched the fang move easily in it's slot, receding back into the soft tissue inside it's mouth. That looked... more than a little uncomfortable, Simon bit down on the inside of his mouth, reassuring himself of his oral stability as he imagined the feeling of his own teeth sinking back into his gums like that. Unless this man had an extremely unusual condition indeed, Israel's claims about what he was were beginning to look like they might actually have some foundation. Not that the man necessarily was a vampire, but at least that the whore hadn't simply chosen someone at random, killed them, and then filed down the dead man's teeth.
"Two days ago." Simon answered, narrowing his eyes and leaning in closer, to watch as the fang sank right back into its place, disguising itself aptly amongst the other teeth in the row, "Unbelievable." He murmured, pulling a pad out from the bag still slung across his shoulder, and quickly flicked through page after page of illegible esoteric script and diagrams to find a clean space in which he could begin to record what he was seeing. It was the next question which made him look up from his work, meeting Sciurus's eyes with the same intensity of gaze as the other man was holding him in, "He had a chest wound as well, but I'm told it didn't kill him. As far as I'm aware, the decapitation was the finishing blow." He didn't even have to lie about that. Just omit the fact that he'd been present for the completion of the act. Simon glanced back to the head as Sciurus began pulling the tooth down again, making a few more notes and sketches, he finally asked, "Are you familiar with any species which is capable of this? It could be this man is one of those circus folk, part dog or what have you..."
Simon had never actually seen a head being dissected before. So when Sciurus began the somewhat more mechanical process of the dissection, he only began sketching and recording with more intensity, even hesitating to reach out and carefully feel the texture and weight of the peeled back skin, before scribbling frantically to record this discovery. When Sciurus began sawing, despite the slowness of the task, Simon couldn't help but remain fascinated by the process, and was actually slightly put out by Sciurus's decision to talk about the weather of all things to accompany it. Still, what was there to do but to talk back?
"Mm, yes, I rather miss the clouds myself. The sunshine is adequate and certainly necessary to a degree, but we don't get it often enough for me to be accustomed to the temperature it brings with it." Simon observed, with a certain amount of boredom in his tone, only beginning to smile when Sciurus began defiling the dead again. "Although you're quite right, I do suppose his mood is now immune to the shifting of the weather!"
A chest wound... Oh, Sciurus wished dearly to see the rest of the body. What other curiosities the corpse could have bared. What if the victim's hands were capable of growing claws-- like some sort of wolf-man-- or his toes were webbed? Well, the latter wasn't completely alien to Sciurus. He had a few fair cousins with such an affliction. Oddly enough, it hadn't granted them a natural aptitude for swimming... He rotated the head, saw working its way around the skull, and stared at it as he spoke to Simon. "No," he said slowly, a delayed response to the man's earlier question. "I can't think of any species with retractable teeth. In fact, in a predator, I hardly see any use for it. Thousands of species get on just fine without their canines drawing inward, after all." Another rotation. "To be honest, the only practical use I can see for this-- at least, in a human-- is camouflage." He paused, staring at the specimen as though he expected a response from it. There was one slow tilt of his head as he watched it, then it was back to work. "I can venture an evolutionary purpose for it, were that the case, but without knowing anything else about the subject... He is simply an anomaly." He shrugged, then set the bone saw aside. The skull had been properly scored, so all he needed now was to complete the separation of the calvaria from the lower skull. It was oddly cathartic, tapping away at the 'dotted line,' so to speak, and a feeling of immense satisfaction washed over Sciurus as the skullcap came loose. Gingerly, he set it aside and retrieved the scalpel, ready to make an incision in the brain's protective membrane. At first glance, everything appeared normal. Of course, he wasn't the greatest expert on the human brain, having most of his experience with animals. Nevertheless, at first and subsequent glances, he didn't see anything unusual about the brain. Perfectly normal. For all intents and purposes, this was a normal human man, albeit with a strange birth defect.
This, of course, did not stop Sciurus from poking about in the dead man's skull. He couldn't make any incisions-- the brain was still too soft for that-- but it was still fascinating. He hoped to treat it and dissect it at a later date, purely for the fun of it. It was rare that he had a fresh human brain to examine, after all. Hopefully, Simon would let him keep the specimen.
"Canines aside, I don't see anything remarkable about this man," he concluded, upon examining to his heart's content. He carefully withdrew a handkerchief and began to wipe at the gore and fluids that had gotten on his hands. "Perfectly ordinary," he added, a twinge of disappointment in his voice.
Simon let out a slight sigh, looking morosely at the dissected head. "Ahh, well, I suppose there's nothing for it then." He considered how best to return the skin to the bone, mulling over a number of options before finally deciding that it would probably be easier to just leave the head with Sciurus. Payment for his expertise. This decided, Simon gave a slight nod, "Well, If that's all there is to it then I shan't trouble you any longer. Still, thank you for this. You may consider me indebted to you." Not very indebted. Just a bit indebted. Reasonably indebted.
Simon turned towards the door, musing over their meeting as he did so, before hesitating as though realizing something, "Oh! And... if you're ever interested in seeing the rest of the body..." He turned to face Sciurus again, scribbling his details down in his pad and ripping the page out to hand over to the other man, "Please feel free to drop by."
Simon took the last chance to examine Sciurus before leaving, and he had to admit despite his initial revulsion, he was beginning to see a certain nobbled charm in the other man's appearance. Not attractive perhaps, but not all together ugly either.
This decided, and his work done? Simon took his leave.